Social Media

As a culture, we are constantly connected to each other. That has its advantages and drawbacks. Lori Deschene explains positive aspects of social media in Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind. She says, “You can leverage it to make new contacts or expand your business. You can use it to showcase your expertise, share what you’ve learned, or learn from people you admire and respect. You can use it to stay informed, entertained and connected”(133). I decided to use social media as a tool to showcase work outside of my web portfolio. I have a lot of photography that I would have liked to include on my website. However, I felt it was more appropriate to create a flickr account to display my photographs. I also have videos of my animations and walkthroughs of my eBooks that I showcase on youTube. I also signed up for LinkedIn as a way to keep it touch with my professional relationships. All three of these social media sites are linked to my online portfolio. I have also signed up for pinterest this semester. I have been avoiding pinterest because it was my understanding that it was primarily hair & makeup tips, fashion advice and recipes. However, pinterest has been a great source of inspiration. Its many design boards have quality examples of brand boards and information architectures. They have product designs and posters, letterheads and business cards. Pinterest is (partially) a community of designers and design lovers, sharing good design with one another. (Though, it is mostly hair, makeup, fashion and food). 

To Do Lists

As the end of my final semester at Quinnipiac approaches, the adage,  “so much to do, so little time”, has never been truer! I have to finish my web and print portfolios, write papers, and prepare presentations. I have gotten very little sleep over the past couple weeks and even pulled a couple all-nighters. I keep reminding myself that it will all be worth it. All of my hard work will be evident when I have portfolios I can be proud of. I have taken some advice from the book, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, on how to make it through these last weeks. In the book, Mark McGuinness recommends limiting your daily to-do lists. He suggests writing the list on a post-it note. He says, “if you can’t fit everything on a list that size, how will you do it all in one day?”(28) Granted, whether or not you can accomplish a post-it note worth of tasks in a day depends on the size of the task. Still, he makes a good point. At the beginning of last week, I made a list of everything I needed to accomplish that week. I, then, made note of what day those tasks needed to be done by, and chose the best days to do them. I proceeded to make seven smaller lists, one for each day of the week. Each day, I looked at to corresponding to-do list and accomplished everything on that list. For me, it was a less daunting way to approach the week. I found myself only focusing on the daily tasks. I was able to pace myself and still be productive. I can proudly say that I was able to accomplish all of my goals for last week and plan to do the same thing this week.

Distractions

I have been staring at a blank blog for the past 30 minutes. In that time, I have flipped to two other websites and checked my email in another window. About 10 minutes out of the 30 were spent staring off into space, daydreaming. I have so much going on in my head and around me that it is hard to concentrate on the task at hand. Writing a post. This is how most of my work starts off. Once I have a solid idea and actually start working, I get in a zone and everything around me turns to white noise. It's the getting started and shutting off the distractions, that is tricky. Christian Jarrett, a psychologist, warns that having email, social media and other distractions open and readily available while you are trying to be productive, may not be the smartest idea. He says that even though we may tell ourselves that we are going to take a five minute break to check our email, the break usually takes a lot longer. Once you break from working, it is easier to stay on a break and get distracted by other things. Instead of ignoring distractions, he advises we get rid of them. He says, "we must strive to remove them entirely from our field of attention. Otherwise, we'll end up using half our mental energy just keeping ourselves from breaking our own rules" ( Manage Your Day-To-Day, 83-84). I get distracted very easily and I am working on becoming more focused. Today, I worked without music or Netflix playing in the background and have found that I have been very productive!

My "Career"

I was asked today, like I am asked every time I meet someone lately, "What do you want to do with your life?" I feel like that is such a loaded question. I want to be a graphic designer. However, that could mean a lot of things. Graphic designers are very talented people. We can do many things. Using the skills that I have acquired at Quinnipiac, there are a lot of possibilities. On top of that, with technology changing rapidly, there are new possibilities emerging every day. Asking me to pinpoint, today, what career I am going to have for the rest of my life is nearly impossible for me to answer. The concept of "career", itself, is almost a thing of the past. People are no longer entering companies right out of college and staying there, in the same position, until retirement. According to Robert Safian in Maximize You Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build An Incredible Career, "The average time an American worker stay in his or her current job is 4.4 years"(46). He explains that when someone has a passion for what they do, they are constantly learning new skills. Especially in the design world, keeping up on new trends and technology is very important and leads to new opportunities. Personally, I like the idea of staying at one company until retirement. However, not in the same position. Who knows what opportunities there will be for designers in the future? All I know is that I plan to constantly learn and grow as a designer and go wherever my work takes me.

Brand Identity

 "Even if the brand identity is not published or visible, to have one, to work to create one, is vital for making a coherent book, It is the guiding light that shapes the 'flavor' of what one chooses to include in any portfolio"-Valan Evers, Photographer and Faculty, The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, as quoted in No Plastic Sleeves by Larry Volk.

The operative word there is "work". Creating a brand identity has been work. It's soul searching, in a way. Creating a brand identity for yourself is creating a logo, color scheme and word mark to represent who you are. Who you are as a person, as a designer, as a brand. After I had a logo that I felt was successful, I started working on a color scheme. I knew I wanted it to include black, white and grays, so my logo could work next to other color schemes if necessary. I chose teal as my accent color, not only because it is my favorite color, but because I feel like teal is bright, calm and happy at the same time, while also not making a big deal about itself. I think it can go unnoticed if it is not put with the right colors.
The next aspect I chose was my font. I wanted a sans serif that looked modern and classic at the same time. After looking at font after font, Century Gothic just seemed to fit. Looking at my brand board, I felt like something was missing. The colors were too solid. I needed a pattern. Something to give variety and style to my brand. I made a pattern out of my logo and applied my color scheme. It was just what I needed.

Mind Maps

This week, I assembled a mind map to organize the information my portfolio will hold. To do this, I used coggle.it, a free online mind map generator. My mind map includes a list of the projects I have done at Quinnipiac, as well as outside projects, categorized by media. I did this so I can reflect back at all of my work and effective choose the right ones to showcase in my portfolio. I have also included a list of my technical skills so employers will have a better sense of what programs and languages I am proficient in. Though my courses will not be listed in my portfolio, I included them in my mind map as part of the brainstorming process. My portfolio will include an About section which will contain my identity (business cards, letterhead, etc), my resume, a short bio, and contact information. I will also link to this blog.

A mind map is just another way to visually brainstorm, similar to sketching, storyboarding and drawing thumbnails. I am a visual learner, which means I understand information better when I can see it. Organizing the information in a colorful web, makes it easier for me to see and comprehend the portfolio process as a whole. 

Creating A Logo

Creating a personal logo has been a complex soul searching journey. I have researched personal logos in hopes of finding some inspiration, but was lost in a sea of initials. I typed “creating a personal logo” into Google, expecting some simple formula. I wanted Google to tell me what to do.  The Google search actually turned up an article called “How to Construct a Personal Logo” from the site, Inspirationfeed.com. I read that article from top to bottom and had no more of an idea then when I started. Staring at the blank pages of my sketchbook, I realized why I was having trouble. My personal logo should reflect me, my passion, personality and ability. No article is going to be able to tell me who I am or how to represent myself. I am a “home-made”, “personal touch” kind of person. In 25 years, I have never bought a card from a store. Most of the presents my friends and family have come to expect from me have been paintings or mixed cds (complete with cover art). I believe that “home-made” and “one of a kind” trump “ordinary” and “commonplace”. I want a logo that feels “home-made”. I experimented with watercolors this week, watching how the layers of color interacted with each other. I like how watercolors look free but controlled at the same time. The colors don’t spread beyond the wet boundary you set for them but within the boundary, they run free. This is similar to my own personality. On the outside, I am calm and controlled. On the inside, my mind goes off in different directions. I constantly have ideas flowing through my mind. I also tried out a few different design concepts. I found myself gravitating towards the number three. Many of my designs included three circles. The three circles would represent me as an artist, designer and game designer. More work needs to be done to figure out what logo is the right fit for me but I feel like I am on the right track.